


Give Life Back to Dance

by gracesofthechild



Series: Avengers Team Building Series [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Family, Ballroom Dancing, Dancing, Domestic Avengers, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, POV Natasha Romanov, Post-Avengers (2012), Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-24 22:09:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3786046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracesofthechild/pseuds/gracesofthechild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha works hard to put memories of her past life behind her and make new memories in their place; Steve helps pull himself out of his old life and takes her with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give Life Back to Dance

**Author's Note:**

> First in a minific series that has moments of team bonding and friendship interspersed between the movies. Can be considered AU post-Avengers where they all live together, or canon but pre-Phase Two, which is probably going to be the setting for most of these fics. These will all be gen and/or follow canon pairings. If anyone has any other suggestions for pairings/trios and what you want to see them do, please let me know.

The thing that Natasha had most needed to do for herself once she joined S.H.I.E.L.D. was to re-learn everything she had ever been taught.

She’d had plenty of time to do it when she was first brought in, between the psychological testing and frequent interrogations, plus the physical assessments and health evaluations. She’d been kept in solitary confinement for what had felt like years (but Coulson had told her was only months), and had nothing to do but practice every single thing she’d learned in the first twenty-two years of her life. 

One morning it would be reciting all the words in Chinese that she knew and forming as many sentences as she could; then for that afternoon it was practicing on her pillows how to fake first aid in ways that would actually kill the target; and in the evening it would be climbing, leaping and twisting from off a wall or even the ceiling onto her bed (those watching her in solitary had fussed at that one, Clint told her, before he asked her to teach him how to do it). 

This, as she explained to the psychologists and the interrogators, was her way of re-evaluating and then re-inventing herself. For the first time, she got the choice to keep or dispose of all the skills in her arsenal so that she could choose for herself what skills she had. There were some things that she had done in those rooms that had been taught to her when she was young and that she’d used for years; those things had been performed for the very last time in her life within that room during her confinement. 

It was something that was true; pruning away the things she didn’t want to ever do again was a helpful transition from her skillset as Natalia Romanova, and established her professional identity as Natasha Romanoff, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. She used it to test her capabilities as objectively as she could. It was the first time she’d catalogued everything her body could do. It was also a way for her to fill the time, before they allowed Coulson to bring her books and Clint to bring her handheld video games and both of them to bring her movies on portable DVD players. 

However, there was another reason, one that Natasha kept closely guarded and hadn’t told anyone, not even Clint and Coulson. Not only did she want to separate in her own mind the skills and tactics that Natalia Romanova had used, but she also wanted to create a new set of experiences and a new mental association between each and every one of those things she had done. Even if that association was made in her small cell with a round-the-clock team watching and evaluating her, they would be better memories than any other time she’d learned or used this skill. It would be a way for her to invent her new self emotionally as sell as physically.

One of the books that Coulson had gotten for her was a series about a teenage spymaster who caused a revolution and put a new queen on the throne. She thought the books were fine, but the thing she had most liked was the spymaster’s ability to mentally separate her personality, her knowledge, and her emotions from a false outer persona that was constructed for interrogations, and that outer persona had no access to the inner thoughts and the real person beneath. The doctors Natasha asked had told her they had never heard of someone doing that and thought it would be extremely inadvisable to attempt. 

Still, it was something that took her interest and that she tried to incorporate into her habits. Re-learning a move brought with it a memory of performing it that wasn’t tainted with her past life, and identifying names and faces during interrogations allowed her to bury memories of those people as much as she could. Even things as small as accents gave her a new recollection to add to all the things that Natasha Romanoff had ever said. 

The new things she’d done that time were just as special to her, and she slotted them in her mind right along with the things she was re-doing, because all of them were important in her figuring out exactly who Natasha Romanoff was as a person. Improbably, it also made almost all of her time spent with the handlers and the psychologists positive. Natasha could easily recall the first time she’d had a hamburger along with her first new time eating mashed potatoes, and then deciding that she liked both. She remembered her first time trying on a pair of flip-flops while she was being measured for shoes, and then throwing them at Clint when he dared her to walk silently in them. She re-read War and Peace but this time in English and in French, and preferred the English version. They helped to replace all the experiences she didn’t want to remember. 

Once she was allowed some freedom from her confinement, Natasha tried to do as many things as she could and have as many different experiences as possible; not only to build a resume, but to decide what things she liked and disliked, what things she was good at, and what things about herself that she wanted to share with others. At the beginning all of those experiences were by herself with Clint or Coulson, but eventually she started to branch out. Sharon was shocked when Natasha asked her to teach her to snowboard, but Melinda had no discernable reaction to her interest in learning Tai Chi. It was something that Coulson was wary of and Clint pouted at, but something she enjoyed immensely. 

She got to make even more new memories of things while undercover and on missions, such as drinking a margarita for the first time with Pepper and showing off her boxing skills with Happy as Natalie Rushman. Natasha always tried, in some of those moments, to let just a little bit of her real personality show through if appropriate, in order to genuinely experience the moment as much as she could. 

Natasha hadn’t thought that anyone else would understand why she did this, especially the people that she met at S.H.I.E.L.D. who were all open about their pasts and who they were, but the Avengers had changed that. She learned about Tony Stark the showman and businessman, but later knew Tony Stark the genius inventor. She found out that Bruce always did yoga in the Hulk room that was installed in the tower. She heard all the new, different foods Thor sought out during his time on Midgard and how he was learning to cook so he could re-create them on Asgard. All of them had a public identity as an Avenger, but also an identity that was their true self that was private and intimate to them, and some of them were still trying to find exactly who that identity was. These people understood what it was like to be re-made and to have to define who their new self would be. 

Eventually she told Steve, one day, when he came to her and confessed just how lost the past few years of his life have been between Project Rebirth and freezing himself into a new time, and how much trouble he had remembering who he was before everything changed in his life. She told him what she had done after Clint brought her in, and he showed her the list he was making of everything he wanted to experience for the first time. That night they abandoned their paperwork and made their way through Jurassic Park, and after that she spent time with him between assignments. 

\--

One of those times that she got to experience her new memories was when Steve came to her with something he wanted to both learn and re-learn. After they got closer together, he told her more and more stories about his life before Project Rebirth. He mentioned going out on double dates with Bucky and having to sneak into dance halls without having to pay. He talked about how he used to be too weak and out of breath to dance for hours on end the way the girls could. One time, he mentioned that he always wanted to learn more dances along with the swing that Bucky had done before the war started, and asked her if she knew how to dance. 

Tony had called her a ballerina once, and that wasn’t true. Natalia Romanova was trained in classical Russian ballet, but Natasha Romanoff had picked up ballroom from one of her longer undercover assignments. 

She was happy that, when he asked, her memories didn’t go right towards instructors that made her sleep in positions while remaining completely still, or having to bruise and bend her foot into place every night. Instead she remembered a bright young man who called her Anya affectionately; a strong Russian man who could deadlift her so easily, she thought that he might’ve been trained like she had; and the sweet women who taught her how to dance, how to instruct, and how to let a man lead her.

Natasha smiled at the memories and told Steve that she could teach him some dances, but wouldn’t it also be fun if we both learned something new together? And he smiled so genuinely, pulled out his list, and told her about the guys outside his apartment that would breakdance on Saturday nights. From there, they set out on something they could learn and re-learn together.

After that, they started spending more time together outside work. Natasha taught him how to foxtrot and quickstep and cha-cha-cha. He was able to learn waltz while she was away and surprise her with it when she came back. She bought him the right pants and shoes, and he tailored his own shirts after she commented in horror on his chest-to-waist ratio. She purposely avoided intimate rumbas and sexual sambas for him, but he threw himself into jive and salsa. He showed her the Lindy hop and the jitterbug from what he’d been able to remember. She tutored him on how to listen to the music, how to turn his head the right way, and how to look up videos from dance competitions online. 

They bounced around dance classes, traveling all over the city and taking as many lessons as they could when they were both available. They learned bolero from a couple that owned a tiny dance studio in Brooklyn, and hip-hop from the guys near Steve’s apartment. They went to mambo one week and tango the next, then spent a month learning bhangra that left both of them out of breath. She taught him how to Skype so during missions he could show her and Clint via video chat the West Coast swing he’d been learning, and Clint showed them both how to vogue. Natasha avoided modern dance due to her ballet training, but Steve went to jazz classes, and Tony got him a huge collection of rock & roll songs and dances for his birthday. 

It was something they both threw themselves into any time they got the chance, and Steve was happy that he had something to do in his free time that he found rewarding. He thanked her after every lesson, and she smiled and thanked him right back. It helped both of them navigate their way through this new part of their lives, and made them closer to each other during missions and battles. 

Whenever they’d go to lessons he would always partner with her or the instructor, or occasionally the elderly women when their husbands got tired. She teased him about his inability to approach any of the young single girls in the class, but they broke through to him eventually when he started talking to the artists who got Steve back into drawing. Even though they were both good at picking up moves quickly, they were far from great at many of them; Steve had trouble with performing and terrible balance, she was always ahead of the music and would frequently injure herself from not following directions. 

They told the other Avengers, who had previously thought they were going on dates, including Clint. Steve blushed and stammered when he told Natasha that Pepper and Tony had both taught him to waltz, but he was happy to learn yoga with Bruce. Thor showed them Asgardian dances that he said were all named after animals. The Goat was apparently more of a performance piece, while the Wyrm was a dramatic, Paso doble-like dance involving a lot of throwing that he would attempt to teach Jane. None of the team joined them for lessons, but each of them would occasionally meet up to eat afterwards wherever they were, and both Steve and Natasha also had new foods crossed off their lists.

Natasha learned more and more about herself, the people she danced with, and her teammates. She found out she especially didn’t mind learning more about Steve; she liked to make memories with him, she discovered, and nights after they danced together she always went to sleep with fewer nightmares.


End file.
